Book Image

Android Development Tools for Eclipse

By : Khirulnizam Abd Rahman, Sanjay Shah
Book Image

Android Development Tools for Eclipse

By: Khirulnizam Abd Rahman, Sanjay Shah

Overview of this book

<p>The increase in Android's popularity with every passing day cannot be understated. This has resulted in a large programmer base willing to contribute to its success. Eclipse has a powerful IDE and has been adopted widely by programmers across the globe. The focus of ADT is to use existing familiar territory and ease development of Android applications. In this sense, ADT provides a one stop solution for Android application development.</p><p>Android Development Tools for Eclipse is a step-by-step guide that provides you with hands-on, practical, and to the point discussion and steps for using Eclipse tools for developing, debugging, and signing Android applications for distribution. It also teaches you to incorporate advertisements to monetize your applications. Every concept and its usage has been demonstrated in this book by implementing them via real world applications.</p><p></p><p>Android Development Tools for Eclipse starts with the installation of ADT, and then discusses important tools before guiding you through Android application development from scratch, demonstrating different concepts and implementation before finally helping you distribute your applications in the Android market. You will start the development of your first application, explore project structure, and add different widgets including multimedia ones.</p><p></p><p>You will learn everything about developing, debugging, testing, distributing, and monetizing your Android application using Eclipse ADT.</p>
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
9
Index

APK – Android package

The Android package (APK), in simple terms, is similar to the runnable JAR or executable file (on Windows OS) which consists of everything that is needed to run the application.

The Android ecosystem uses a virtual machine, that is, Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) to run the Java applications. Dalvik uses its own bytecode, which is quite different from the Java bytecode.

A tool dx under Android SDK converts our Java classes to .dex (Dalvik executable).

The .dex files and resources of application (XML and images) are packaged by the tool aapt (Android asset packing tool) into the .apk file.